Any SSD experts here?
 

My old laptop is slowly dying. It has served me well (almost 10 years), I used it extensively from gaming to slide scanning to Hi8 video restoration. I had to replace a keyboard, battery, power adapter and two of it's three hard drives, one 2.5inch and one SSD (!).

I'd like to use as much as possible from this laptop including both SSD drives. They are mSATA3 format and I'm playing with the idea in putting both in one external enclosure. Easier said than done, since most items on Amazon or ebay offer space for just one drive. I stumbled across on Amazon, but the specs are doing more harm than good. A little excerpt:


Umm... what?

The two SSDs I would like to use in this enclosure are:
* SanDisk SDMSATA512G 512.1 GB
* Samsung SSD 860 EVO mSATA 1TB 1000.2 GB

The question here is if I can use both which are different in size in this enclosure. The next logical question or idea would be whether I can combine both physical drives into one volume.

What are your thoughts?

As far as I can tell, the enclosure you linked to supports two mSATA drives, I can't be sure but I suspect that your SanDisk drive has a regular 2.5" SATA interface, which means that it would not fit the enclosure you linked to. You would only be able to fit the Samsung SSD in it and will not be able to make use of the features that it has been designed for (setting up two drives in a RAID setup).
If you want to reuse both drives, you need two different enclosures. I would have a look at the health of both drives first, as SSDs do have a limited lifespan based on the number of writes that have occurred during its life. See here for some tools: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/...-windows-10-11
If the drives have some health left... it might be useful to buy one or two enclosures. If most of the specified writes for these drives have been used up, I wouldn't put much trust in them or invest in an enclosure.

You can achieve what you want with that case, assuming it supports the B-type connector (i.e. one slot cut into the edge connector) on your Sandisk and Samsung - it almost certainly does. But an Orico such as would be a nicer thing to use in general.

I probably wouldn't combine the two drives into one, though, in either housing, whether the feature is supported or not: their basic architectures are just a little too different for my personal comfort. Data tends to sit around on external devices, so it's my external stuff that I want to be the most reliable.

The only Sandisk SSDs with a 512GB capacity that I can find are 2.5" regular SATA drives, they do not use the M.2 format. That is why I said that the two drives would not fit into one enclosure. If both drives are indeed the smaller format B or M keyed M.2 drives, then you could use the case Bushfiva linked to, or the one in your original post, but the rest of my advise still stands: check whether there is any life left in them first.

Would this work?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/374825948...Cclp%3A4429486

These could be combined in a NAS type device, which:

• would be much more expensive, and
• a very bad idea...

NAS options permit keeping multiple drives as independent volumes, or combining in various forms of RAID.

The short version:

• With two drives, you would only have two options, RAID-1 (mirroring) & RAID-0 (striping).
• With drives of different sizes, you are effectively limited to the smaller of the two sizes
• With RAID-1, you would get only 500 GB of storage, but you would achieve redundancy in case of a single drive failure.
• With RAID-0, you would get 1TB of storage (500 GB on each drive), better performance, and in the event of a single drive failure - lose all data.

Good luck.

I thought so too... but when I looked at a list of Sandisk SSD models, all the mSATA ones were 500GB, the only ones that were specced as 512GB capacity were regular SATA ones. I guess the list may not have been complete.

Thanks for all your replies.

My SSD learning curve went almost vertical, I am quite pleased that I can use those "future" spare SSDs for a second life.

It could also depend on the regional market, although I haven't found many differences lately. There used to be a huge difference between the US and EU market.

Good points. At this point I am mulling a JBOD setup with the device that Bushfiva recommended. Both SSDs show at 98% health with Crystal Disk Info. Both disks would be used for temporary data and not solely as data backup.

For your particular use case, I'm not sure my recommendation will do anything that your initial choice can't also do. It's just that your choice looks, well, a bit sucky and I can't tell if it switches between RAID modes using DIP switches or a button push. If the latter, then you need to be VERY careful because the out-of-the-box setting is RAID 0, and if there's any kind of glitch that resets that while you're using it for JBOD, you'll be unhappy.

By the time you've spent $75 on my recommended unit, you're already spending more than an external 1TB SSD would cost anyway, and pretty close to what a 2TB item costs.

So, I wouldn't touch your choice, but maybe you shouldn't touch my choice :-)